This journal entry is about my weight loss
project. Since June, 2001, I’ve lost 45 pounds. I
didn’t use fat blockers, get my stomach stapled or learn
faux-boxing with Ty. People have asked me how I did it,
so here’s my secret:

Don’t eat so much and try to move around a bit.

Because I live most of my life in my head, I was never
one to think much about my physical health. As long as
my body didn’t interfer with my brain, that was good
enough. Besides, I pretty much looked like I did in
high school, right?

That illusion came to an end last year for a number
of personal reasons. One way you can tell if you’re
overweight (or in my case, obese) is to use the Body
Mass Index (BMI) tables provided by the US Center
for Disease Control. This is a good way to
estimate how much weight, if any, you ought to lose. The
index is a number derived from your height and
weight. Adults should ideally have a BMI between
19-24.9. When I started my BMI was
over 30, indicating that I was in the initial stages
of obesity. You can find before and after pictures of me on Taskboy.

With the problem identified, a solution
could now be sought. The first thing to understand
about weight loss is that you got fat in the first place from your
lifestyle. Being a programmer, I tend to sit around
the house. I don’t enjoy running, nor did
I at the time have any physically demanding activities. The
other problem is that I ate whatever and whenever
I wanted to. I drank a lot of really good beer.
This combination of eating indisciminately and not
moving is the most effective way to become a lardbutt.

In order to stop gaining weight, I had to modify some
of my behaviors. To lose weight, I
needed to commit to long-term plan.

I’m a lazy guy. Dragging my butt to gym and
eating celery sticks for lunch is as appealling
to me as getting bamboo sticks shoved between my
fingernails. Here was and is my strategy:

cut back on beer (ouch)

do pushups 5 days a week

walk around my local park 5 days a week

eat diet frozen dinners or salads for lunch
and dinner. Have ceral and (100%) juice for
breakfast.

take up biking

go off plan once in a while

Most dietary experts I came across suggest that
you should only lose 1-2 pounds a week safely. When I
started actively trying to lose weight, I was 215 lbs. I
wanted to be 170 lbs. At best, I was looking at a 23
week program, but more realistically a 45 week one. In
other words, I wasn’t going to lose the weight in a
week, or a month or two. I think this is the hardest
part about weight loss. It’s a long term commitment.

Life goes on, despite our best efforts to halt the
world for a moment. I knew that I wasn’t going tto
follow a strict regiment for 10 months without some
deviations. Like I said, I’m lazy and not into pain.

My exercise started very modestly. I think I was doing
5 pushups and walking 1.5-3 miles a day for the first
month. I pushed myself to do more as the weeks when
on. At some point during late winter, I was doing 40
pushups and walking 6 miles a day. This translates to
about 2 hours of continuous excerise. It’s enough to
build up a sweat, but not enough to require time in a
hot tub (that’s optional).

I think what helped me stay on track was that I built
a web tool, called Thinner, to track my exercise and
morning weight. It
uses MySQL on the backend, so I am able to create
graphs of my progress (or lack thereof). Instead of
that, let me reproduce a table of my average weight
and BMI for the last 10 months.

You’ll notice a huge gap between June, 2001
and December, 2001. That’s because I hadn’t committed to
diet and excerise. Unfortunately, you cannot
lose weight without
both. The good news is you don’t need to live a gym
(or even go to one) to lose a small child’s worth of
weight. It just takes time.